Jamie Adams

Replacing Goodreads

Goodreads is a social book cataloging site. At its most basic level
it allows users to maintain a virtual library of the books they read.
Users can rate and review books & participate in discussion groups.
It was founded in 2007 and has around fifty million users.

I’ve been using Goodreads over the past seven years to keep a record
of the books that I read. Over the past year I have been trying to
reduce my Internet footprint; closing my accounts on all of the major
social networks and in general just trying to keep as much of my data
under my control as possible. Goodreads has been selected as the latest
one to be led to the guillotine. I thought about this one a lot; it’s
pretty harmless, doesn’t suck up mountains of time and I’ve had the
account for years. It was a bigger wrench than closing my Facebook or
Twitter accounts.

I do value the data that I’ve given to Goodreads, and I want to carry on maintaining it once the account is closed. Jamie Todd Rubin
has created some crazy clever python scripts to parse and present data
from a list of books held in a markdown file. I exported my data from
Goodreads, bodged it into markdown format and used my very limited
python knowledge to adjust his scripts so that I can track progress
towards my annual goal.